5 Companies That Dropped The Ball This Week

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Oracle's fiscal third quarter results had some investors fleeing for the exits, sending shares down more than 8 percent in the wake of the vendor's Q3 earnings announcement.

Oracle was expecting software and cloud revenue to grow 3 to 13 percent, but instead saw it drop 2 percent year over year. Hardware sales dropped 23 percent, compared to Oracle's expectation of flat to down 10 percent.

Despite the sub-par results, Oracle executives painted a rosy picture for the future. Oracle later this month will start shipping servers based on its new SPARC T5 microprocessor, and CEO Larry Ellison said this will help Oracle get back on track. "Next year will be a big growth year for our hardware business," he said on the earnings call.